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Climate Change

Understanding the causes and impact.

Climate change is caused by the human production of greenhouse gases. When the gases are released into the air, it travels upwards and creates a blanket over the earth. As a result, it traps the sun's heat thus causing an increase in temperatures. These affects are experienced by humans not through the temperature increases, but also with natural disasters, rising sea levels, droughts, and health. With an understanding of climate change, policies and actions can be taken to reduce the impact for future generations.

Charts

Overview

To start lets understand the contributors to climate change from a human perspective. In the charts below we gain an global perspective of greenhouse gases. Further along with additional charts, we dive in deeper to understand the financial and health effects of climate change.

Within the past decade, greenhouse gases have increased globally. When diving into the different economic parts of the world, based on GDP, it is appears that lower-income countries have contributed less compared to other countries.

To gain insight into the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions,using the slider, can observe how much the economic parts of the world contributed.

The charts below provide the top countries that have had high greenhouse emissions. Based on this information, it appears that the United States and China have higher emission rates that other countries. There could be additional reasons for this, such as population size or even sectors. Using the first graph, it is possible to click on the country and see the distribution within the sectors and over time as well.

In the chart's below we provide a perspective on the impact of one the greenhouse gases that is produced the most. Based on the information of the charts, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) compared to the other gas types has increased substantially, perhaps due to the energy industry. As a result, it appears that within the last two decades, the temperatures have remainded fairly high. The high temperatures are a concern for populations as it affects agriculture, ecosystems and human health.

Climate Change Impacts

As temperatures change due to greenhouse emissions mainly from (CO2), the enviroment tends to shift as well resulting in wildfires fires due to more droughts and less water that is accessible. Additionally, natural disasters become more prominent in areas that were not affected as much.

Financial Impacts and Human Repercussions

Following up on the natural disasters, we provide insight on the costs effects of climate change. As you can see, there isn't just property damage, but also human costs such as injuries and deaths.

Health Effects

In the following charts, we see the health effects as a result of climate change.

This graph focuses on the number of hot summers experienced. The following graph focus on the US. Based on the view, more people can feel the temperature increase from 1991 to 2010. Although the population exposed to hotter summer doesn't increase from 2010 to 2021, it is likely that as time goes on people may experience longer hot summer days over that time.

We may navigate how the temperature will change under different situation of greenhouse gas emissions. The graph represents the number of days across the year over the 95 degree F. It is obviously that people experience much more hot days under high emission. People may live in hot days for more than 3 months under high emission as for about one month under low emission.

Hot days will not only make us keep staying indoor but also casue illness. Let`s walk through some facts about HRI, which called Hot-Related-Illness. The following two geomap are the annual number of hospitalizations for HRI as well as number of HRI deaths over a 5-year period. We can see more deaths occur as temperature rising in recent years.

Summary

The visualizations provide some information on the impact of climate change. The financial costs and the effect of human livelihood are important to be aware of. As such, it is imperative that as a community, people work together to understand and find ways to ameliorate the effects through policy and everyday use to save the planet and save lives.